A PENGUIN HABIT

Courtesy of Steve Hare

"If you own a hundred china dogs you can only really put them in a cabinet and dust them occasionally. Books are different, and it is pretty well impossible to imagine a book collector who is not an avid reader as well."

Let’s talk about the psychology of addiction. You’re young, impressionable – still at school – wanting to emulate the older kids who’re always so cool, always so knowledgeable. One day someone offers you your first book; maybe it’s an old Puffin. You sneak it home, and look through it. The very smell of it; the feel; the pictures – you’re hooked. Soon you’re haunting charity shops and jumble sales, picking up as many as you can so long as they’re cheap.

And then you need a stronger fix, and graduate to orange Penguins, old Pelicans and finally the really hard stuff: Class A Penguins – Peregrines; the Pelican History of Art. Or maybe you’re into designer gear; you crave the refined tastes of first editions, insist on perfect condition and the original dustwrapper; or maybe volumes from strange and foreign climes. You hear that there are wartime Egyptian editions; Italian, Israeli, even South American ones.

By that time you have network of regular dealers; you’re meeting fellow addicts, buying and selling; dealing, essentially, to feed your own habit. You’re well and truly hooked. You’re a Penguin collector.
Welcome to the Penguin Collectors’ Society. It’s a kind of rehab, but not a cure.

For anyone thinking that starting a collection of Penguin Books is a shortcut to immense wealth, my advice is to stop right here. What it can offer is endless frustration, the thrill of the chase, a constant drain on the wallet – all those things that serious collection of anything drags along in its wake – and then a whole lot more. And it’s in this “whole lot more” that the great majority of Penguin addicts find untold satisfaction, excitement and a direct link to one of the key cultural developments of the 20th century.

It’s really, even today, not that hard to acquire at least 900 of the first thousand books in Penguin's original main series. But the last hundred are tough to find, and the final ten is a quest for only the most dedicated, and – more and more these days – the well-off. Prices asked, and presumably fetched, for notorious rarities are climbing steeply.

The harder it gets to find the books you need, the greater the temptation to buy odd volumes from the many other series that Penguin soon spawned that you keep coming across. There’s several much less frustrating avenues to pursue, with relatively easily achievable goals: the ten pre-war Penguin Illustrated Classics, adorned with woodcuts supervised, and occasionally produced, by Robert Gibbings; the 76 hardbound and mostly colour illustrated King Penguins that were designed as collectors’ items from the very start; the children’s books, particularly Noel Carrington’s beautifully lithographed Puffin Picture Books; Nikolaus Pevsner’s astounding undertaking to visit, record and analyse every significant English structure – The Buildings of England series.

The Society boasts members ranging from the entirely casual to leading experts – and indeed, a significant number of early contributors to Penguin’s production. Some members specialise in design, typography and illustration; every author has their champion – membership of the Society is the obvious destination for anyone who knows they’re hooked.

It started off simply as a small group of enthusiasts and has grown, in the 30 years of its existence, into a serious organisation concerned with conservation, academic research, and the dissemination of information, usually in publications that echo the typography and design of the original books, rendered impeccable by Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller. If that sounds all a little worthy and serious, well it is – but there is also an immense shared pleasure in the acquisition of knowledge about the books, as much as in buying, selling, exchanging and gradually refining and improving a collection.

One of the essential things about collecting Penguins is that it opens doors into every field of human endeavour – you know, some of us actually read them. So none of us really is obsessed about inanimate objects for their own sake. If you own a hundred china dogs you can only really put them in a cabinet and dust them occasionally. Books are different, and it is pretty well impossible to imagine a book collector who is not an avid reader as well.

Think on that – a kind of addiction that feeds, rather than addles, the brain.

Steve Hare is the author of Penguin’s 60th anniversary celebratory publication 'Penguin Portrait'. He is a trustee of the Penguin Collectors' Society (http://www.penguincollectorssociety.org) (as well as its publisher), and is a serious collector of Penguin Books.